Genius Has Side Effects
by AleTheHOUSEwife
Summary: Collection of one-shots, mostly Huddy and partly Hilson  bromance . Comedy, Romance, Angst  bits of , Friendship. And yes, there's even huddy!sex. And the Wilson/House friendship prequel as sketched in 5x04.
1. Worthwhile  HCu, What if, Romance

**Worthwhile**

**– –**

by Ale

* * *

– House/Cuddy

– What if

– Follows from The Butterfly Effect but you can read and enjoy anyway

Basically H/Cu are living together and she's lost Joy but never got Rachel. This is what I can tell you without spoiling anything.

* * *

Cuddy's house, September 20.

– –

"House."

"Mh."

"Wake up."

"No."

"Ok then. I'm gonna leave you here. Bye."

Cuddy jumped out of bed, grabbed her cellphone and turned it on. It had to be a beautiful day, judging by the fair blue stripe of morning sky slipping its way inside the room through the slightly disjointed cottoned curtains.

She inhaled slowly as to flavor the smell of daybreak, cracking the window open. It was a beautiful, sunny day indeed. Perfect for her favorite late-summer fitted dress, the dark blue one with small printed pink-ish flowers. Now, she just had to find it and see if she could still slip into it.

"For heaven's sake. I'm freezing in here."

She turned to House.

"I can't see icicles yet."

"You will! Leave the window alone."

But she just grinned. She walked to his side of the bed and went for the blanket and sheet. He tried to fight as hard as he could from where he laid, but she eventually got hold of them and pulled.

"I hate you."

"I know."

Cuddy smirked.

"I'm not giving up on this."

House fell silent. Eyes wide shut, he tried to relapse into his nightly, fuzzy dreamwork.

She went to the bathroom and poured fresh water on her still sleepy, delicate features. Dropping her satin night gown on the floor, she slowly walked into the shower, her face still adorned in pearly waterdrops. She ran her fingers onto her silky neck, breasts and abdomen, then she hesitated for the fraction of a second, hands on her stomach. Every morning for the last four months she had frozen in that position, to feel the slightest swelling with her fingertips, investigating every inch of her skin to unveil the secret hidden inside. Was it still there? It was an irrational thought as she knew perfectly well it wasn't going anywhere soon. At least, she wished that.

What was she waiting? Cuddy wondered how to drop it to House. They hadn't planned anything like that, most of all given his present condition. That was why she was keeping it from him. It had just began as a matter of time and unconfessed superstition: she had discovered it very early during the first weeks, the unforgettable, glorious day she'd had to direct the whole hospital from the private bathroom in her office, blaming it on the luxury French dinner she'd had the night before with House. But then she had discovered some weird spotting on her underwear and that made some bell ring in her mind. It was blood. On her panties. And she'd been puking and spotting the living daylights out of her day after day for almost a week, until she had decided to get an answer, whatever it was.

And she was pregnant, that was the answer. Pretty imaginable, given the symptoms. Pretty undesirable, in their situation. She thought the whole spotting business was gonna end with a miscarriage very soon, so she had decided not to bother House with it.

Bad idea.

She was feeling pretty guilty now, because whoever was in there was hanging on pretty well. Had been. For ten whole effing weeks since the spotting had stopped inexplicably on its very independent, rebellious own. And now she was going to bump the life out and House was _so_ going to notice. Well, that was stupid. She had to tell him. She wanted to. She felt somehow assumed to take him out on a romantic date and hint cleverly at _the thing_, until the waiter would bring the apple pie with whipped cream and she could finally give her screwed up, crippled boyfriend a pair of gift-wrapped baby Converse, silencing his surprise with the hottest display of sexual attraction which could be considered appropriate for a public place like a restaurant. Which was... a kiss. With tongue maybe. But not sucking the life out of his face.

Ok, that was definitely trashy. Cuddy turned serious. She had to stop talking to herself every morning like that instead of talking to House, soaking under a geyser of water and heat, fantasizing about soapy sceneries turning into sick college movies where the girl is pregnant but the boy doesn't mind the arising disapproval of, because they are going to raise the baby together and be loving and perfect all the way till the end of the world, and he's not going to Vietnam, because it's 2010 and no one goes to Vietnam anymore. Or Pearl Harbor, whatever. Cut. Interiors. Nursing home. The Nobel Prize for Peace 2040 visits an elderly couple sharing a room, you know, to end their days together.

"Hi mom, hi dad."

"Hi kiddo. You know, we were so stupid we didn't even use a condom. But hey, we gave birth to a Nobel Prize. How cool is that?"

That was House. Definitely.

But she was slipping into stupid fantasies. Again.

She was four months pregnant and she hadn't told House yet because he was not in the best shape ever to father a child _and it was so unexpected_ and to tell the truth that sucked. Bad. Cuddy's stream of consciousness ended with the water turning unexpectedly cold.

"Crap."

She grabbed a towel and wrapped her head into the soft, clean cotton, then she wore her bathrobe and walked out of the room. House was still in bed. And he had managed to fall back into his sleep, albeit the open window and the light. The man was tough. She sat at his side on the edge of the mattress, flavoring the look of his naked arms and chest. She planted a kiss in the crook of his neck, running her fingers onto his scruffy features and closed eyes. She held out a whisper.

"House."

He didn't move, but she saw his lips slightly turning upwards as he unsuccessfully tried to pretend he was still asleep.

"House. Wake up... We're running late."

"I know."

He smirked, his blue piercing globes still hidden underneath the veil of sleep. He lifted his right arm and wrapped it around her shoulders, causing her to bend over him. He smelled her fresh perfume and the warm feeling of her wet skin. Now he could feel her breath, the unmistakable presence of her lips almost touching his. That was his favorite, though short, moment of their kisses: the few seconds when their lips were about to join never ceased to gift him with the bliss of a wait whose outcome was certain, crowned by the final contact. He drew her closer. And closer.

"House."

They were almost there.

"House."

"Yes."

She didn't even think of that. It came out on its own.

"I'm pregnant."

House opened his eyes and sought contact with hers. She found it hard as she was feeling guilty about her omission. But he smiled.

"I know."

He knew. How did he not know? He'd been watching her all that time and you can't hide a pregnancy to your medical maverick boyfriend. He _knew_. He was just waiting for her to be ready to share. As unexpected as it was, he couldn't help but be scared the heck out of him.

And that was frankly ok: he had gone through worse than that. And back.

They shared a sweet, soft kiss and then he let her rest her head on his chest, as he rubbed her back with his hand, looking up at the ceiling and then to the morning sky, pink-textured with small, fast moving clouds. He wished he could reassure both her and himself they would not screw things up. Ever.

They rested there for some time, listening to the sound of each other's breath.

Then she sat up and stroked his cheek with a tender smile.

"Come on, take my hand."

As every morning now, he grabbed her hand, wrapping his free arm around her neck as she sustained the back of his head to help him up. She delicately removed the oxygen cannula and put it back on the nightstand, as she slipped another pillow behind his back, to help him staying seated while she was turning to stop the oxygen flow from the breathing apparatus. The sight of what kept him breathing night after night still managed to send a sting through her chest. She hated it. She hated having to rely on an oxygen tank to see him open his eyes at daybreak. But every time she turned to him to look in his beautiful, smiling blue ocean irises, all of her fears dissipated in thin air.

"Cuddy."

"Yes."

"Don't smash the tank against the wall. I kinda need it. And. You already look fat."

"Thank you. Now you can crawl your way to the wheelchair."

She didn't let him speak back, silencing him with the kiss her announcement had previously interrupted. He smirked.

"Finally, I should say."

"Oh, shut up."

Cuddy raised the sweetest smile he'd ever seen illuminating her features.

She was not going to give up on making his life worthwhile.

– – –

a/n: so, this is the first one-shot in this collection. I kind of needed a dose of hope and happiness as I wrote this. As you noticed, I kept House's condition hidden till the end of the story. Mostly, because the focus was meant to be Cuddy's stream of consciousness as she was finding the courage to drop her unexpected pregnancy to a still recovering House, bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life due to what happened in "The Butterfly Effect". Hinting at the situation was less distracting than dropping it in the first line of the story.

Secondarily, I wanted this story to be enjoyable to everyone, and I thought the eventual revelation of House being in such peculiar a situation could work well even for those who haven't read the prequel. Maybe it aroused your curiosity. Anyway, House's conditions are what is keeping Cuddy from sharing the news. And her apparent coldness was just functional to the fact that the thing comes completely unplanned. The rest of her stream of consciousness comes from fantasies inspired by ep. 15 of season 7, where she imagines her life with House and then realizes she's such a naive girl. :)

I was sick of sadness and angst as the latest events on screen have turned particularly dark, so this is an experiment in lighter writing... Let me know if you hated it, so I can go back to people dying and gunshots and accidents. :)

alex


	2. Angels On The Moon  Song ficlet

Song ficlet.  
In retrospection, House's life doesn't look like a failure, does it? At least when he's facing the end of the road, he can't say he hasn't lived, and loved.

* * *

**Angels On The Moon**

_Do you dream, that the world will know your name  
__S__o tell me your name.  
D__o you care, about all the little things or anything at all?_

He watched the light of day sneaking in and out his room everyday. Silent, guarded, the light walked the floor of his room in padded feet. It would dance around, caress the nightstand, the bedsheets, the walls. It would color it all up every morning: pink, orange, golden glares fighting for a square inch of space. Strangely, he wasn't even remotely scared of what was going to happen. He had felt it coming from the first moment on.

_I wanna feel, all the chemicals inside, I wanna feel.  
I __want a sunburn, just to know that I'm alive.  
__To know I'm alive._

And he was alive indeed. He was alive in every drop of blood, nerve cell, eye blink. Everything was amplified to make up for the small space he was confined in. His inner space was getting larger and larger every second he spent with himself in the quietness of that room. Maybe it was because giving up his earthly habits would have been easier for him, with an entire _soul_ to explore, to hold on to.

_Do you believe, in the day that you were born  
__Tell me do you believe?_

He had experienced love in all his might: he had been sick of it, nauseated by the smell of it because that was something he hadn't been _assembled_ to carry. He had loved two women in his life: one he had pushed away, one had pushed him away. But in all that, he had loved with all his heart, even when his moves had been the wrongest possible. He'd had one friend, and he had held on to that friendship like a life vest.  
He'd had his skin scratched, his bones cracked, his blood shed. He'd had his fingers on someone else's skin, his lips on someone else's lips. He'd had his eyes bruised, and his heart wounded.

_Don't tell me if I'm dying, cause I don't wanna know  
__If I can't see the sun, then maybe I should go  
__Don't wake me cause I'm dreaming, of angels on the moon  
__Where everyone you know, never leaves too soon._

He'd had people's lives on his shoulders, and never had he unburdened himself from that load. What for, he had never known, but he had been tied to the idea of life in a knot he had gone lengths not to break. Someone had sensed that, rarely. Most of the time, though, he had been the one hidden in the dark, the _deus ex machina_, the master of puppets. All to serve a purpose which he did not even know of.

When Wilson came in to check on his friend, House was long gone. Without his cane, without his misery, without the pain. With a smile, and a quiet sigh heaved while no one could have been listening.

_This is to one last day in the shadows  
__And to know a brother's love  
__This is to New York City angels  
__And the rivers of our blood  
__This is to all of us, to all of us._


End file.
